Basic information

• SOM: self-organizing map (SOM) (or Kohonen map)

• unsupervised machine learning technique used to produce a low-dimensional (typically two-dimensional) representation of a higher dimensional data set

• Computational complexity: \(O(S^{2})\)

• Original book - Teuvo Kohonen, 1982

A self-organizing map (SOM) or self-organizing feature map (SOFM) is an unsupervised machine learning technique used to produce a low-dimensional (typically two-dimensional) representation of a higher dimensional data set while preserving the topological structure of the data. For example, a data set with p {p} p variables measured in n {n} n observations could be represented as clusters of observations with similar values for the variables. These clusters then could be visualized as a two-dimensional “map” such that observations in proximal clusters have more similar values than observations in distal clusters. This can make high-dimensional data easier to visualize and analyze.

Pros:

• Data can be easily interpreted and understood with the help of techniques like reduction of dimensionality and grid clustering.

• Self-Organizing Maps are capable of handling several types of classification problems while providing a useful, and intelligent summary from the data at the same time.

Cons:

• It does not create a generative model for the data and therefore the model does not understand how data is being created.
• Self-Organizing Maps do not perform well while working with categorical data and even worse for mixed types of data.
• The model preparation time is comparatively very slow and hard to train against the slowly evolving data.

Algorithm

1. Randomize the node weight vectors in a map
2. Randomly pick an input point
3. Traverse each node in the map:
   • Use the Euclidean distance formula to find the similarity between the input vector and the map’s node’s weight vector
   • Track the node that produces the smallest distance (this node is the best matching unit, BMU)
4. Update the weight vectors of the nodes in the neighborhood of the BMU
5. Increase s {s} s and repeat from step 2 while

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Examples

Example 1